Sawbones: Exploding Teeth
Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/
Listen and follow along
Transcript
Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion.
It's for fun.
Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil?
We think you've earned it.
Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth.
You're worth it.
All right, Tommy is about to books.
One, two, one, two, three, four.
We came across a pharmacy with its windows blasted out.
Pushed on through the broken glass and had ourselves a luck around.
The medicines, the medicines, the Escalant Macau
Hello everybody and welcome to Sawbones.
Meryl Tour of Misguided Medicine.
I'm your co-host Justin McElroy.
And I'm Sidney McElroy.
And I'm Justin McElroy.
This is a weird one, Justin.
Why is that?
I mean, I can tell from the title that it was...
Well, don't say the title.
I would never say the title.
Don't spoil it.
No, I would not.
I didn't even want to put it...
in the title because I didn't want to spoil it for you either.
But I also saved these outlines so that they're searchable for me later.
And so if I don't have it in the title, it would be hard to search it.
Yeah.
So you have to put
your indexing and filing and organizational structure over narrative suspense.
I respect that.
You know how organized I am with the indexing and the filing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're just obsessive about that.
Just making sure everything is just so.
I know.
I was working at Harmony House today and my poor residents and students who train with me,
they'll offer to get something.
I'll be like, I need to get this for the patient.
And I'm in the exam room, and they're like, Well, I'll go get it.
Where is it?
And I'm like, Okay,
in my bedroom, which by the way, is-I mean, if you've ever looked inside, you can barely move.
I mean, literally, you have to stand sideways and scoot your way through my little, my supply room.
I was like, It's if you go in and then look to your left, you're going to see a shelf where there's some small cups and a collection of thermometers, and also some prenatal vitamins.
Now, to the right of that, you're going to see a box that's entirely full of immodium.
Now right behind that and not where you see the stack of antibiotic ointment or the rapid HIV test, but right behind that, you're going to see.
Yeah.
Now digitally though, Sydney goes for just a big vat of docx files.
Just a big
bunch of files with the.docx file extension that she just pours into a big, big vat.
Is that not how she needs one?
She just puts on the snorkel and the mask and just dives in look for the docx files no you go to you go down to what is it finder
you go to finder and click on finder and then you type in the name of the thing you're looking for in finder and it finds it um it's good structure it works it works for you see but anyway you know i don't know anything about teeth this famously yeah canonical famously doctors don't know about teeth we leave teeth to dentists and we do not interfere with dentistry.
Yes, you don't enter the tooth lands.
We do not enter the lands of teeth.
We are not taught about teeth.
We don't talk about teeth.
Here's what we know about teeth.
Sometimes people come in and they're like, my tooth hurts.
And I'm going to shine a light in.
It's the time that they usually do this.
You guessed it.
Go on.
I'm going to shine a light in your mouth and look at it.
Which is really hilarious because what am I looking at?
What are we even looking at?
I'm like, well, I see the tooth.
And like, if it's black, black, that's bad.
And then if the gum looks
if it's black, take it out, Jack.
If there's a hole,
someone else should do drill it.
Drill it.
Drill, baby, drill.
I mean,
when you get a cavity, you know, the first thing they do is make it bigger.
Come on.
So usually what I'll do is I'll shine a light in your mouth.
I'll look and go,
yeah.
I bet that hurts, doesn't it?
And then the patient says it does.
That's why as you look at it and I'll say,
we should probably do some antibiotics.
Yeah.
And then you should see a dentist.
And that's it.
Like, that's what we do because that's how much doctors are.
Unfortunately, for 500 years, the tooth court and we have feuded and we are no longer permitted in their lands.
We have a whole episode about that, about the rift between doctors and dentists.
If you ever want to check that out.
I thought this story, even though it is in the teeth realm, was interesting enough.
The teeth realm.
It has long been a missed lock to us doctors.
Sorry.
In the court of gums and molars.
I thought we could talk about this because even people who have actual dental knowledge don't seem to know how to unravel this sort of historical medical dental mystery.
So thank you, Samantha, for sending me this story.
I had never heard it and I was very excited to read about it.
I am going to start with some initial accounts of a strange dental phenomenon that it was, they were recorded in the dental cosmos.
Whoa.
I know.
The dental cosmos was the first American dental journal, like the first scientific journal about dentistry was called the dental cosmos, which,
man,
we, can you imagine there was a time where you were like, I need to learn about either dentistry or medicine, and I could read the dental cosmos or the lancet.
So cool.
Both good.
Journal of blah, blah, blah is so boring, and that's what we call everything now.
The dental cosmos is good.
So the dental cosmos was a journal that ran from 1859 until 1936, and then it was absorbed into the American Dental Association.
And so now I believe it is called the Journal of the American Dental Association.
And it was then absorbed into Entertainment Weekly.
So now it is just a web page.
And now Disney owns it all.
It was the, like I said, it was the first scientific dental journal.
It was very highly respected.
And I say that because I want you to understand how seriously this is like these reports of this phenomenon were placed in what would be akin to, well, I mean, I guess the Journal of the American Dental Association today,
or on, for those of us who are physicians and think about physician things, like the New England Journal, right?
So like.
This was a big deal.
In volume two, issue six of the journal, which was published in January of 1861, there is a collection collection of several case reports.
And you can do that sometimes in scientific journals.
Like, it's not really a study I did.
I collected case reports of this one specific disease or treatment or whatever, phenomenon to describe it and try to further understand it.
Okay.
The first case is a story of a reverend from Springfield, Pennsylvania, who began to experience a toothache on August 31st of 1817.
So this was published in 1861.
These are just three accounts from, I mean, really like
50 years before.
It's been a long time separating this happening and the publication of this tale.
This is, well, and that's, I mean, there's a long time separating me talking about it, the publication of this.
So the pain was in his right superior canine or first bicuspid.
When you find out what happens here, the fact that we don't know exactly which tooth it was is pretty strange and already calls a lot of stuff into question.
So either way, one of these two teeth, it was so severe, and they document like he tried burying his head in the ground.
He tried sticking his head under a fence, which I don't know what that would.
I was sitting there trying to think, is that an expression?
It hurts so bad.
I stuck my head in.
But why?
It's like, I think, to distract me, just like that.
So he stuck his head under a fence.
Yeah.
He plunged his head into cold water to no avail.
It hurt so terribly.
He was delirious with pain all day, all night.
And then the next morning on the 1st of September at 9 a.m.,
he heard a very loud sharp cracking sound in his mouth and his tooth quote burst into fragments whoa immediately following this the pain vanished and he was fine oh can you imagine what a relief that must have been i'm kind of jealous That his tooth exploded?
No, but like to be in that kind of pain and then all of a sudden be out of that kind of pain.
I mean, an exploding tooth is a bummer, obviously.
But, I mean,
it's a big finish.
It is a big finish it's a big finish it was dramatic it's a dramatic big finish like you want to have something to share well okay can I ask you a question actually doctor wouldn't it have been more upsetting if it had just stopped and nothing had exploded isn't that more mysterious isn't that in many ways more troubling Because why did it stop?
Well
listen, I can't, I cannot consider how troubling that may be because there are, let me tell you a little secret.
There's a lot of times in medicine where something's wrong and you're like this feels weird or this hurts or this is I don't know odd and we're like hmm hmm Let's wait a few minutes And then it goes away and we're like hmm oh good if it went away.
It must not be too serious
There are lots of things where the human body just feels weird and then doesn't
later.
Yeah.
I don't know.
That is something that I think we don't say enough.
Like that is something to expect with your human experience and your human body on this human planet is at times your body will feel weird and then it won't.
And you can ask me and I might come up with some theories.
Yeah.
And occasionally, maybe we would be able to figure it out.
But there are going to be a lot of times where I'm like, I don't know, but I'm sure glad it stopped.
I think the whole reason we developed spoken language as animals is so we could ask each other, do you get the thing where if you've been sitting for too long, you feel like your leg isn't there, even though it is there.
Do you get that?
That's the whole, that was the first sentence ever spoken, actually.
And the other person was like, yes.
Oh, thank goodness.
I'm so glad you do too.
So this guy's tooth exploded.
And that's, that's what we're going to talk about.
Did people's teeth once explode?
And if so, why?
And
also, why don't they now?
I guess, would be the follow-up question.
There are two more cases in this journal article that follow.
There was a woman from Vernon, Pennsylvania in 1830 1830 who had a superior molar explode.
There's not a lot of details given about that.
There was a woman in Hip Hill, Pennsylvania in 1855 that had a superior canine split in two.
Superior meaning on the upper part of the mouth, top,
top canine.
Yeah, gotcha.
Which also sounds like I'm complimenting your dog.
Yeah.
But it's the tooth.
Gotcha.
So it split in two after about an hour or after a bout of intense pain.
So basically what we have is one really detailed account and then two pretty brief accounts saying
sometimes if your tooth hurts really bad, it will blow up.
And then the author goes on and can I tell you, along with the titles of these scientific journals, the way that people used to write in them is, I love it.
It's amazing.
It is not.
It's not
well, it is way more entertaining.
Yeah.
And it is not at all in a, in some sort of like easily recognizable structure.
Like now, a journal article kind of falls into it.
I mean, obviously the sections are structured, but the way that it's discussed, the tone, the language, it's a, there's like, there's, there's, I mean, there are rules, but there's also just, you know, things we do that we understand.
Yeah.
This does not fall into that.
It's almost like a philosophical musing on what could have happened that follows in this journal article where the author starts to talk about like what could have happened here and so first of all he theorizes that it was a buildup of something called caloric inside the tooth caloric meaning caloric we have no there i caloric
a noun caloric yes okay there is a substance that he believed existed called caloric okay that i assume since it sounds like calorie would have some sort of energy connection some sort of buildup but we do not have a substance called caloric in our body.
Some sort of amount of food had made the tooth swell, perhaps, a fat tooth.
But there was too much caloric.
And then it exploded.
Oh.
Which is probably not true since there is no such thing as caloric.
Well, not after it explodes, certainly.
At that point, it's released into the air.
The other option that he proposes is gas.
Because
he, and he talks about, like, we understand that gas particles expand.
Yeah.
And so
gas particles expanding inside the tooth would also cause it to expand.
It's infection.
It's like creating some sort of gas as an offshoot of that.
Who knows?
Now, listen, what you are saying right now is
we're going to get to that.
That does make sense.
Okay.
However, we wouldn't have known that at the time.
Oh, okay.
The idea of gas-producing organisms that would cause infection in a tooth.
Are you saying at those times I would have been a genius, Sidney?
Yes, just because of my advanced medical knowledge.
You would have been a genius.
Amazing.
But
after these two theoretical, like these are some things I have thought of these things.
Here's my two hypothetical, maybe it's this things.
The rest of the article is the author chastising dentists who will say,
because I don't know what's causing your tooth to ache, I will not drill a hole in it.
Basically, that is the rest of it, is him saying, there will be people who say, well, your tooth hurts and I don't know why, but I got this drill.
Let's try to make a hole and it will relieve the pressure and you will feel better and your tooth won't explode because of those brave pragmatists who picked up the drill and took action.
But there will also be people who are afraid and who are weak.
They don't take the big drills.
They don't get the big
teeth.
They won't do it.
And they won't pick up the drill.
They'll say, I don't know why your tooth hurts.
I don't know.
and then they'll say well maybe maybe we should just let
it take its course and let the tooth explode if if that is what will be we should allow it to be yeah if you're so smart then let your tooth explode tough guy and maybe the reason they'll say that is because
you know it's not that big a deal it's just a toothache and you just need to bear the pain and maybe that's because these people have never been in true pain this it's a wild it is a wild.
Like the rest of the piece is about this.
Yeah, it's about how like some dentists don't know what it's like to feel pain, I guess.
And so they would just say like, deal with it.
It's no big deal.
And that these people, he compares them to false staff.
Oh, wow.
He says that they are courageous until they are put to the test.
Of drilling teeth.
No, what he's saying is that if you went into a dentist and you were like, my tooth hurts, and they looked at it and said, I don't know, it looks fine.
He is dividing the dentist that would see you into two categories.
There would be what he considers like the brave dentists who would say, it looks fine, but why don't I put a hole in it?
Just to make sure.
And there would be the not brave dentist who would say, it looks fine, so I don't want to put a hole in it.
Let's wait and see what happens.
And just to be clear, they're the worst kind of people that exist on Earth.
According to this author, according to this author, yes, because he goes on to say the reason that they would do this and not be brave is because basically they don't see your pain as legitimate because they've never actually experienced true pain and they think they're tough, but really they would cry like babies if they had a toothache like this.
Actually, he says the terms he uses ball lustily
if they were in this kind of pain.
Ball lustily.
Oh, yes, B-A-W-L lustily.
Thank you.
Thank you for that clarification.
Anyway, i don't i don't know why all of this is needed in this journal article i read the three accounts of the teeth exploding and then it went on to this i mean
i mean at the end he's like
and let those who and these are in quotes never heard of quote saw or quote believe such cases quote possible just for once in their lives be willing to born out of darkness into the pure light and usefulness of quote open vision
okay end of article wow that's how it ends boom i don't know what it is about the exploding teeth that made this dentist so angry
but his point is too far like people got to start getting serious about teeth because they're exploding people this is where we're at this is where we let it get to they're exploding we got to get serious about we have to get serious about drilling these teeth i don't know why they're exploding you don't either put a hole in it
and get control
So, anyway, I would really, if you're the sort of person that enjoys reading old scientific articles where they, they kind of use this language and where they show like that they're angry and upset.
This article
from, like I said, I think I gave you all the details.
It's in the dental cosmos.
It's, and it was, it's available.
A lot of this is available free online in case you're curious.
Yeah.
And unless you have to.
The University of Michigan Library has most of the cosmos on it.
Unless you have so many dates
with sexy people that you are unable to read them.
I think it's very cool.
Anyway, so is that the only time in history that people's teeth exploded?
Yes.
No.
Oh.
I'm going to tell you about the other cases, but before we do that, we got to go to the belly department.
Let's go.
The medicines, the medicines that escalate my cards for the mouth.
You want to eat smarter.
You want to eat faster, though.
You don't have a lot of time to make these delicious meals, but you want to be putting all the things in your body that you love, that you crave, that you need with a great taste and not a lot of time commitment.
You got to reach for factor.
I keep a few of these in my fridge at all times.
Anytime I want a real actual meal, you know, not some bar that I've ripped open, but a real hearty meal, and I don't want to wait more than two minutes to do it.
The Factor is there for me.
With over 65 weekly meals to choose from, the variety here is is really unreal.
If you were already a factor member, right now you might have in your fridge garlic herb chicken with a vegetable risotto and roasted green beans.
You can just heat up and eat it.
No problem.
You want charred corn and shredded chicken cavatopi?
No freaking problem.
Oh, but Justin, I don't have two hours to make.
Aren't you listening?
Two minutes, you could be eating a delicious meal from Factor.
They are very, very tasty, very easy.
And they're, you know, you could tell these are made by people that care about your body and your tongue is smart at factor meals.com slash sawbones50 off and use code sawbones50 off to get 50 off your first box plus free breakfast for one year that's code sawbones50 off at factormeals.com for 50 off your first box plus free breakfast for one year.
Get delicious ready-to-eat meals delivered with factor.
Offer only valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase.
Oh, these shorts?
You've noticed them.
Yeah, these are sort of a transitional short.
They go from the warmer months to the more formal short wearing months of August and September.
When you need a classier short, where did I get them?
Yeah, thank you.
It's very flattering.
Quince is where I get most of my semi-formal shorts like these.
With the great prizes at Quince, you can get the perfect short or pant or any other garment or other item for whatever occasion, but you're going to get them with a great price and really wonderfully sourced.
Listen to this.
Quince has all the elevated essentials for fall.
Think 100% Mongolian cashmere from $50.
Washable silk tops and skirts, perfectly tailored denim.
By partnering directly with ethical top-tier factories and cutting out the middlemen, Quince delivers luxury quality pieces at half the price of similar brands.
I've really been impressed with all the garments that I've gotten from Quince.
I'm going to keep buying from them as a regular customer, even after the ad, because I've just been so impressed by these, and everything I've gotten from them has fit great, and I felt great about buying it.
Keep it classic and cozy this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.
Go to quince.com/slash sawbones for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
That's q-u-i-n-ce-e dot com/slash sawbones.
To get free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com/slash sawbones.
Jackie Cashin.
Hi, and welcome to the maximumfun.org podcast, the Jackie and Lori Show, where we talk about stand-up comedy and how much we love it and how much it enrages us.
We have a lot of experience and a lot of stories and a lot of time on our hands.
So check us out.
It's one hour a week and we drop it every Wednesday on maximumfun.org.
Hello, podcast recommendation service.
Hello there, young man.
I'm looking for a new podcast to listen to.
Something amusing, perhaps.
Oh, what about Beef and Dairy Network?
Something surreal and satirical.
Well, I would suggest Beef and Dairy Network.
Ideally, it would be a spoof industry podcast for the beef and dairy industries.
Yes, Beef and Dairy Network.
Maybe it would have brilliant guests such as Josie Long, Heather Ann Campbell, Nick Hofferman, and the actor Ted Danson.
Beef and Dairy Network?
I don't know.
I think I'm going to stick to Joe Rogan.
The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is a multi-award-winning comedy podcast, and you can find it at maximumfun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, you're telling me that teeth have been doing this all the time for no good reason?
So, I thought this was weird because this article was published, and it's really, it's just these three accounts of teeth exploding with much less conversation as to why, and more of the, like I said, shaming dentists who won't drill teeth.
But they're all from Pennsylvania, for one.
They're all three, which I'm, I don't know if the dentist just, it doesn't seem likely that it was the same dentist who collected all three cases because the first one's from 1817 and the last one is from 1855.
It's a family, a multi-generational family of exploding tooth trackers.
So I don't, so I thought, like, is this just something about weird about, and to be fair, I did not look up these three cities in Pennsylvania to see if they were close to each other.
Springfield, Vernon, and Hemphill.
Maybe it was all the same neighborhood.
This is something I could have done.
I don't know.
But the point is, are there other places other than Pennsylvania and maybe other dentists who've observed these teeth exploding?
So I found in a book called Pathology and Therapeutics of Dentistry with Miscellaneous Essays on Dental Subjects by J.
Phelps Hibbler, DDS.
It was published in 1874 in St.
Louis.
And there were more cases.
including one that he personally observed.
So I think that gives, that's a little more valuable, right?
These aren't hearsay.
This isn't like somebody told me.
There's one case which he saw himself, and this was a case of a tooth exploding.
And basically he goes on, and I'll use his words to describe it.
There was nothing very much different in this woman's constitutional makeup, so far as at least I could discern, in terms of like her teeth seemed like everybody's teeth, right?
That she seemed like.
Not explosive at all.
Yes, like just like the usual teeth I'm used to seeing.
She said just before the explosion took place, the tooth was aching dreadfully, disturbing the harmonical equanimity of every part of her organism.
Whew.
To the extent that she at moments was laboring under slight aberrations of mind.
So she was delirious with pain is the point.
She was out of her mind with pain.
All of a sudden, the raving pains eased up greatly.
Just hearing you say that, I want to start drilling teeth.
Having been walking the floor for several hours, she sat down a moment or two to take some rest.
She averred that she had all her senses unimpaired from the moment aching ceased.
So what he's trying to say is, look, I know she was delirious with pain, but then she had a moment where she got really lucid.
And then all at once, without any symptom other than the previous severe aching, the tooth, a right lower first molar, bursted with a concussion and report that well-nigh knocked her over.
I mean, it's
like, what happened?
Her tooth exploded and she almost fell over.
Why did it stop hurting for a second and then explode?
That's wild.
It split and shattered.
At the same moment, having a horrid sensation traversing the eustachian tubes.
So the tubes that connect the back of your throat up into your middle ear.
So she said she was deaf for a while afterwards.
Basically, such a loud explosion that she lost her hearing briefly.
The smell of an exploded tooth.
I can't even imagine.
The whole thing did not occupy but a moment, and the tooth ceased aching at once.
I mean, one would hope.
So we have, and he, but here's the thing.
When I say first-hand account, what he means is this woman told me about this.
So yes.
Nobody witnessed this other than the patient themselves.
This is maybe a thirdhand account, right?
I lose track of the hands.
Well, the patient described it to her dentist, and then her dentist wrote it down.
Yeah.
So it's a secondhand.
He is writing down what she told him happened.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Right.
Yes.
That makes sense.
I mean, I am now recounting it.
So this is thirdhand that you are, you, the listener, are hearing from me.
But where did you read it?
You know what I mean?
I'm reading his account.
Okay, good.
So we're
third hand.
But if somebody's like i heard the wildest thing on this podcast that'll be fourth that'll be fourth hand right which i mean i am not arguing that i am certain these teeth exploded i'm also not gonna argue that i'm certain they didn't explode the only thing you're really arguing is that you're not arguing
and i'm not a dentist so there are a few more scattered uh in his in his book that he wrote, you have a couple more from this Dr.
Hibbler, the dentist.
And you can find a couple other scattered accounts here and there up until the 1920s.
And then you really don't see anything after.
There's like scattered accounts of like, I don't know, somebody, it's always the same.
Someone's tooth hurt really bad and then it exploded.
And then the pain went away.
I had to wonder that if at some point the just like overall quality of dentistry was going to catch up with whatever was causing this problem.
So like we would get better at detecting exploding teeth before they exploded, maybe.
I don't know.
Well, there is this last, okay, this is what throws the whole thing into question.
There's this last account that you find.
It was a letter that was written from the mother of two young children
on the 21st of September, 1965, to the British Dental Journal.
And it was basically about something that happened to her kids.
And what she said is,
And the person reporting this was like, this is so unusual.
This is so strange.
I felt like it was important that the readers of our journal hear this letter
okay which it feels like a justification like listen it's just so weird i had to share it
so she's writing about her kids and she says these teeth became loose and fell out quite normally and didn't appear to be damaged or cracked when i examined them as soon as they fell out so her kids lost some teeth okay
she collected them
maybe in her underwear drawer as some parents maybe yes somewhere
just put loose teeth in their underwear drawer maybe somebody does that the double tooth was placed on the mantelpiece, which gets warm, but not excessively so.
Several hours later.
So this is a tooth that has fallen out of her child's mouth.
She has placed it on the mantle.
Right.
It exploded, sending pieces all over the room.
No.
I collected as many pieces as I could find, but some are still missing.
The two single teeth were put on the mantelpiece in a tortoise shell snuff box, and I didn't realize she opened the box much later and looked, and those two teeth had also split in half.
Whoa.
As if they had exploded inside your soapbox.
So, what we're saying in this case is that these are teeth that have already been removed from a, well, not removed.
They've fallen out of a human mouth, placed on a mantle, and then exploded.
That's wild, Sid.
And I think she makes note of the fact that it wasn't very hot.
So that you're not like, well, but I mean, again, like, can you imagine a mantle, the fireplace mantle that got so hot that if you put a tooth on it, it would explode?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't even know what that is.
It shouldn't be.
Yeah, you can't be like, well, on the other hand, like, no, it's exploding teeth.
Like, it's wild no matter what the circumstance.
Right.
So what is happening?
What could we theorize?
Like, we know caloric isn't real.
So we know it's not a buildup of caloric because that's not a thing.
There is no substance that we know what that is.
What about the gas?
You mentioned like there are bacteria that form gas.
Yeah.
That's where we get, I mean, when we talk about specifically gas gangrene, what we're talking about is an infection in the soft tissue that involves some bacteria that do form gas.
And so you can actually see the gas on imaging.
Like if I take an x-ray, I can see little gas bubbles collecting at the infection site as the tissue is being destroyed by the infection.
So that does happen.
And so could there be an infection in those teeth that, and that's why they had the pain, so much gas built up inside the tooth from the infection that the tooth exploded.
Is that it?
That makes sense.
Dentists, so I've read a lot of like pop sci articles about these occurrences, and a lot of dentists have been interviewed interviewed as to what is their thought on this over time.
And a lot of them tend to say the same thing.
It's hard to imagine that you could ever build up enough pressure from gas inside a tooth to make a tooth actually explode.
Even a disease tooth is really hard and strong.
That's what they think.
So they can't, so they say that the gas explanation just does not feel plausible.
Now, I don't think anybody's ever tried to recreate this like Mythbuster style, like make a fake human human tooth and then put gas inside it and then see if they could blow it up from the inside.
I don't know, but most people think that it's probably not true.
Another option, though, that might be true is what about other stuff that's in your mouth?
Like, maybe even back then, we did dental fillings.
Oh, maybe having a cavity drilled in a filling placed was already something we were doing at this point in history.
So, is it possible that it had something to do with what the materials we used to make those early fillings out of?
So, prior to the 1830s, when we did mercury amalgam,
there were all kinds of different metals: tin, lead, silver, alloys of metal.
There were lots of different metals that you might have put inside a filling.
And so, if two different metals were used in a filling, or maybe even in two different fillings,
you could create
like
an electrochemical cell in the mouth.
Yeah.
The mouth would become, and this is according to, this is fat.
This is fantastic.
Andrea Sella, a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University College London, says basically you would be turning your mouth into a low voltage battery.
Yikes.
So in that case,
maybe,
maybe if you have these different metals, maybe you could have some spontaneous electrolysis.
And
especially if the filling didn't completely fill the whole cavity and there was still a little bit of extra space around the filling for hydrogen to fill in, is there enough?
Then you could have an explosion there in your mouth.
Do we know, is there usually a decay or sorry, a connection between like decay or bad dental work or like teeth are already in bad shape or cavities or anything like that?
So
that's the only problem with this whole story.
Teeth is all bad all the time.
Well, is that
we don't have any evidence that any of the people whose teeth allegedly exploded had any dental fillings in their mouth or had a history of tooth decay otherwise or had like poor dentition at baseline.
It's not as much of a thing anymore.
Right.
But that is the only explanation that I found.
Like if you have a weakened tooth and there's some hydrogen in it, and if it was ignited by, let's say, maybe you had some iron in a filling in your mouth that sparked, or maybe you lit up a cigarette.
I don't know.
maybe you bit on a metal utensil oh god i know sorry sorry but that then maybe you could cause an explosion in a two yikes this is so theoretical and almost almost certainly impossible and again it doesn't really give us an answer because you would think
that somebody would have written about like well and they also they already had fillings in their mouth and nobody ever did which makes you think that these patients probably didn't already have fillings in their mouth and it certainly doesn't explain why that woman put her kid's teeth on the mantelplace and they exploded.
But it hasn't, as far as we know, it's been a while since this has happened with any regularity.
Really, this case from 1965 where the teeth on the mantelplace exploded is the only one that stands out since the 1920s.
Everything ended in the 1920s.
So
at least that we have written down.
I'm not saying somewhere someone's tooth hasn't exploded since the 1920s.
If you all have heard anything about that or heard any teeth explode or heard of like a friend's teeth exploding, you got to tell science about that.
So we have to believe it seems weird to me, Kasak.
We've been doing this show long enough.
It seems weird to me that more teeth haven't exploded since then.
It just seems like law of large numbers.
Somebody's teeth should have exploded by now.
By now,
I don't know.
I don't have an answer for you.
This is a medical mystery,
a dental mystery
that I cannot solve.
And I am, to be fair, not well equipped to do so because I am merely a physician.
but just dabbling in the toothlands yeah i mean i really thought the gas forming bacteria in the teeth that was really my as i read about this i was like oh i know what this is i know what this is that's what i thought too does that make you think that i'm smart yeah but see that's because listen you are only smart about the things i'm smart about in medicine because what i've taught you my lights are only a refraction of yours and i know nothing about teeth so when the dentist interviewed said there's no way that it would be strong enough to to splode a tooth
i would trust that they're right and i'm wrong.
Hey, thank you so much for listening to our podcast.
We hope you've enjoyed yourself and we hope that none of your tfers have exploded for no reason at all, pretty much.
Thanks to the taxpayers for the use of their song medicines is the intro and outro of our program.
Hey, we got a lot of
saw, Sid and I were looking at it a few days ago.
We got a lot of great sawbones merchandise.
available on the website, mackelroymerch.com.
You can find t-shirts.
We have a challenge coin for our 10-year anniversary.
A lot of fun stuff on there that you can go check out.
If there's some merch thing, some shirt or whatever that you'd like that's related to Sawbones, give us a shout.
Sawbones at maximumfund.org.
Also, we never mentioned it, but the Sawbones book is available in paperback and hardback.
The paperback has new stuff about
COVID, and it's a really good book.
Sydney's Brother Taylor Illustrated.
It's great.
That's going to do it for us for this week.
Until next time, my name is Justin McElroy.
I'm Sydney McElroy.
And as always, don't drill a hole in your head.
All right.
Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.